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Nice, FRANCE – The Sky News Foreign Affairs Editor, Sam Kiley, visited Sergei Pugachev and his family to discuss the upcoming litigation process against the Kremlin, and the implications it has had on their lives.

Pugachev states: “It’s not simple to be in my role, but I have to do it, and I am ready to face the consequences… I am fighting using legal methods, but I know we can’t expect the Russian government to use legal methods as well. They [the Russian State] put immense pressure on me, expropriated all my assets in Russia and put unthinkable charges against me, this is the situation I am in today.”

Earlier this year Pugachev and his family were forced to relocate to France fearing for their lives after suspicious devices were found under family’s cars used in London. Now, Pugachev is locked in litigation with the Kremlin, preparing to fight off the value of expropriated assets worth $15bn at the Hague next month.

Kiley writes that those who fall out with the Kremlin have a hard time, giving examples of Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Follow the link to read the article in full and watch the Sky News video report.

Sergei Pugachev gives first interview since fleeing Britain about alleged death threats, being on the run and the man he helped get elected.

By Luke Harding in Nice

Sergei Pugachev doesn’t look like a man on the run. He is in good humour, dressed in jeans and a casual shirt. But the former Russian banker – once close to Vladimir Putin, and now his bitter opponent – is elusive about how he recently escaped from London to France.

“I can’t go into details. I didn’t swim the English channel,” he says, speaking from his new location in Nice on the Côte D’Azur. “It was all absolutely legal,” he adds.

Pugachev is embroiled in a battle with the Russian state, in which he was once a privileged insider. In 2011, he left Russia and settled largely in London, with his British partner Alexandra Tolstoy and their three small children.

His exit from Moscow came after a gradual cooling in his relationship with Russia’s president and, as Pugachev tells it, an astonishing raid by the Russian government on his $15bn (£9.6bn) business empire.

Once known as “Putin’s banker”, Pugachev owned two major shipyards, the world’s biggest mine and significant real estate in Moscow and St Petersburg. Pugachev says all this was taken from him – the asset grab similar to those suffered by other Russian entrepreneurs, the difference being its brazen scale.

The Kremlin, however, says Pugachev is a crook. It alleges that he siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars from loans given by Russia’s central bank at the height of the 2008 financial crisis to Mezhprombank – co-founded by Pugachev in the 90s. It is now pursuing him vigorously in the London courts.

Pugachev calls the accusation “absurd”. “The state steals something then has to defend its theft. In my case the scale is huge, but in other respects this is a normal contemporary practice in Russia,” he says.

Last summer, Russia’s state deposit insurance agency, the DIA, won a freezing order in the UK high court against Pugachev’s worldwide assets. A judge ordered him to relinquish his Russian and French passports and to stay in Britain, pending further inquiries.

Pugachev says he’s now broke, at least by his standards. “I’m down to my last $70m.” Until recently, he was defending himself in court on the grounds he was too hard-up to afford lawyers.

Last month, he dramatically defied the court and slipped out of the country. His passports had been impounded, but somehow he escaped to Paris and then the south of France. Pugachev says he fled the UK for good reason: someone is trying to kill him.

“I’ve been receiving death threats since 2011. I could either obey the order and risk the lives of my wife and children or leave,” he says. According to Pugachev, the DIA’s deputy general director, Valery Miroshnikov, has said his problems in Russia would disappear in exchange for $300m. Otherwise, he or his loved ones would suffer “physical harm”. The claim, made in court, is denied by the DIA’s lawyers.

In May, Pugachev’s security team found suspicious devices planted under his and his family’s cars in London. Scotland Yard’s SO15 anti-terrorism unit took them away. “My conclusion is they are some kind of explosives,” Pugachev says. His lawyers suggest they are tracking devices, planted by the DIA, in the latest piece of intrusive surveillance.

Scotland Yard refused to comment on the alleged bomb plot. “We can’t say anything,” a spokesman said. The DIA’s British lawyers say it is a fantasy – a “tall story” made up by Pugachev to justify his “contempt of court”. Pugachev rejects this. He points to the dismal fate of other Putin critics in Britain, including Alexander Litvinenko and Boris Berezovsky, both of whom wound up dead.

We meet in a five-star art deco hotel overlooking Nice’s beach and sinuous urban promenade. This is his first interview since he fled. Nearby, tourists sunbathe around a frothy hotel pool; from the terrace there is a view of the Mediterranean, a sparkling turquoise; private jets clutter the city airport. The weather is balmy.

He adds that he intends to go back to London – where his children attend school – as soon as his legal issues are cleared up. Currently his family are with him in France.

Now 52, Pugachev was once an adviser to former Russian president Boris Yeltsin. In 1996, he ran Yeltsin’s re-election campaign. This was, he says, Russia’s last free election. He knew Anatoly Sobchak, St Petersburg’s mayor and a “brilliant figure”. He also became close to one of the mayor’s little known aides, Vladimir Putin.

Three years later, with Yeltsin ailing, Pugachev says he was part of a tiny group – including Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana and her future husband, Valentin Yumashev, a Kremlin adviser – who selected Putin to be Yeltsin’s successor. This turned out, he acknowledges, to be a “tragedy for Russia”.

Pugachev co-ran Putin’s successful election campaign and at first was one of his closest companions. “We saw each other every day until late in the night, until 3 or 4am. We discussed state business,” he recalls. Was he the president’s friend? “Putin is a very closed person,” he answers carefully.

Pugachev took Putin round his presidential residence, Novo-Ogaryovo, situated in pine-scented woods outside Moscow. Putin was enthralled, Pugachev says, and liked his new 50-metre swimming pool. “He didn’t expect to be president. He hadn’t had any privileges. It all happened spontaneously.”

What’s Putin really like? Pugachev says two decades as a KGB spy, including time in communist east Germany, inexorably shaped him

“Everything in his consciousness flows from the Soviet Union,” says Pugachev. “He’s of this epoch. He saw Brezhnev and the politburo. Like any simple person he formed his opinions from watching Soviet TV.”

He adds: “Putin was never a politician. He is still not a politician. Discussions don’t interest him. Rather he is someone with complexes.”

Putin embarked on the job of running Russia with no plan or strategic vision, Pugachev claims. “I don’t think he’s an evil genius who wanted to set up the criminal regime that exists today. He surrounded himself with like-minded people whom he didn’t know very well and who had served with him in the KGB. They immediately began enriching themselves.”

According to Pugachev, Putin told him he only planned to stay in power for three or four years. “Putin wanted to get rich, too. He was a pragmatic person. We talked about this. He didn’t want to leave office poor.” By the end of his first presidential stint he was afraid of what might happen if he exited the Kremlin. His inner circle persuaded him to stay on.

That was more than a decade ago. How much money has Putin got now? “Everything that belongs to the territory of the Russian Federation Putin considers to be his. Everything – Gazprom, Rosneft, private companies. Any attempt to calculate it won’t succeed. He’s the richest person in the world until he leaves power.”

Like Brezhnev or Stalin, Pugachev believes that Putin will stay in office for life: “I don’t see any guarantees for him [if he steps down]. Putin doesn’t see them either.”

Pugachev spent 10 years at the top of Russian politics, both as a senator for the republic of Tuva and as the head of aerospace company OPK, one of Russia’s biggest corporations. He had an office in the Kremlin. He says he worked closely with Putin until 2006 or 2007, when they began to drift apart and saw each other less frequently.

Why the split? “We never had the same ideological outlook,” he says. Pugachev adds that he remained independent at a point when Putin expected everyone to kowtow to him. “Putin changed radically. He had his own team, apparatus. I didn’t see any perspective for myself, in politics or business, so I left.”

Since the Ukraine crisis, relations between Russia and the west have sharply deteriorated. Pugachev says that after returning to the Kremlin for a third term in 2012 Putin had a stark choice: to liberalise the country or to engineer something that would distract hard-pressed citizens from their economic woes.

Putin picked the latter. The distraction was his annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine, which fed into a deep-seated sense of patriotism. Ukraine was, Pugachev, says “a big mistake”. “Putin isn’t a strategist. He listens to the politburo that surrounds him, made up of KGB people. They are very aggressive.”

At the same time, Pugachev says, the west has repeatedly misread Putin, believing that granting him concessions might help. “Every compromise he sees as a personal victory,” Pugachev observes. The president often makes up policy on the hoof, a habit which leaves those around him trying to second-guess his intentions, and which leads to “catastrophically uncoordinated politics”.

In exile, Pugachev takes good care of his security; a bodyguard loiters unobtrusively nearby. The tycoon goes and has a cigarette on the terrace overlooking the sea. He’s mindful of what has happened to others, including the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, “a close friend” who used to be his Moscow neighbour. Nemtsov was murdered in February. Who killed him?

“We don’t know. Putin is at the top of the state. He takes responsibility for everything that happens in the state. When an opposition politician is killed 100 metres from the Kremlin the question who killed him is a technical one,” Pugachev says. He adds: “The FSB had Nemtsov under 24-hour surveillance. He was very outspoken.”

And what about Litvinenko? Just down the road from the Rolls Building in London – where Pugachev’s commercial case is being heard – a public inquiry has been given details of how two Moscow assassins poisoned Litvinenko with radioactive polonium-210. One of them, Andrei Lugovoi, is now a prominent deputy in Russia’s Duma. “Putin responds to suggestions,” Pugachev says. “It was decided that Litvinenko was a traitor who had to be punished, so it wouldn’t happen again.”

In several hours of conversation Pugachev acknowledges just one mistake. He says that he played a part in using undemocratic methods to get Putin into power, believing this would be the best way of securing democracy post-Yeltsin. He now concedes it would have been better to have left it up to the voters.

“We have lost all the things we had with Yeltsin. It’s a great tragedy for Russia and it’s people.”

Source…

The once powerful Russian oligarch and now exile claims Putin is orchestrating a campaign to ruin him. Read More

British newspaper Mirror reported that Sergei Pugachev’s vehicles were fitted with possibly explosive devices.

Sergei Pugachev commented: “Those responsible are spiralling backwards, using KGB-style methods that were better left in the past.”
If this is what happens to me outside of Russia, one can only imagine what could happen in Russia. These intimidation tactics further support the fabricated nature of the allegations against me.”

Mr Pugachev is currently believed to be under 24-hour armed police guard after anti-terror cops found devices under his vehicles in London. The devices were found after Mr Pugachev’s personal security noticed the family were being followed and reported their concerns at Belgravia police station in central London on May 19.

Read the article in full

On June 25, 2015 the former Senator Sergei Pugachev gave an interview to the independent Russian TV channel Dozhd (TV Rain), in which he discussed the role he played in the initial election (during 2000) of the current Russian president Vladimir Putin. In a conversation with the prominent journalist and presenter, Ksenia Sobchak, Pugachev revealed his involvement within the circle of decision-makers behind the election.

Expanding on the scope of the role that he played in the formation of Putin’s presidential career, Pugachev said, “I was very involved”. The former Senator said that he “certainly” was within a “very narrow circle” of people who were the movers and shakers behind the election.

“I can honestly say that Boris Berezovsky was not a part of that circle,” – added Pugachev. He explained that, at the time, three key figures were involved in the campaign – daughter of Boris Yeltsin, Tatiana Dyachenko, her husband Valentin Yumashev, and himself.
The Ex-Senator went on to explain that the race for presidency was between two candidates: former head of the Audit Chamber Sergei Stepashin (1999 – Prime Minister) and Vladimir Putin.
According to Pugachev, at the time, Vladimir Putin “did not have the desire to be president.” “He did not have a [political] history, he didn’t go through election from any district council into the Supreme council.”

Sergei Pugachev admitted that it was he who suggested Putin’s candidacy for president – because, due to Putin’s position as the director of the FSB, he had the potential. He was “a key figure, a representative of the security forces.”

Pugachev’s relationship with Putin does go back many years, and, in his words, “continues today, just the format of this relationship has changed”. He added that although he still considers himself as having a “relationship” with the president, it has indeed “deteriorated”.

The English transcript of the interview is available here

Neil Buckley, Eastern Europe Editor of the Financial Times interviewed Sergei Pugachev. He writes:

Sergei Pugachev, the exiled Russian tycoon once nicknamed the “Kremlin’s banker” has said a Russian attempt to extradite him from Britain is politically motivated and he fears being sent back to his homeland.

The industrialist says the bankruptcy was caused by the Russian state expropriating billions of dollars of assets from him, including shipyards, and construction and energy projects, after he fell out with the Kremlin, where he was once a trusted insider.

Mr Pugachev told the FT he sent a letter to Vladimir Putin last December informing the Russian president he intended to launch an international arbitration case under a bilateral investment treaty between Russia and France, of which he is a citizen.
The letter set a six-month deadline for the dispute over his business empire to be resolved through negotiations, which expired last week.

Buckley quoted Pugachev: “This is all a consequence of my fight against Russia . . . and against particular people who committed crimes during the expropriation. Everything that is happening in England and the legal prosecution in Russia has taken on an entirely punitive nature.”

Read the article in full 

Catherine Belton of the Financial Times reported:

“Moscow’s arbitration court ruled on Thursday that Sergei Pugachev should pay Rbs75.6bn ($1.5bn) for his role in the bankruptcy of Mezhprombank, the Russian bank he co-founded.”

“The ruling could open the way for the London lawyers of the DIA, Russia’s state deposit insurance agency, which is acting as the bank’s liquidator, to seek to enforce the claim by seizing the international assets of Mr Pugachev.”

“The former oligarch says the $1.5bn asset gap at the bank was instead caused by a politically motivated state takeover of his empire, led by the sale at a knockdown price of his multibillion-dollar shipyard business, shares in which had been pledged as collateral for $1.15bn in loans from the central bank.”

“One of Russia’s richest men until he fell out of favour with the Russian president and a forced state takeover was launched of his multibillion-dollar business empire, Mr Pugachev called Thursday’s decision “unprecedented and illegal”.

“He said he would appeal against the ruling, which found three of Mezhprombank’s former senior executives jointly responsible, with Mr Pugachev, for the bankruptcy.”

“Mr Pugachev said it seemed clear that the DIA had abused the London court proceedings as “an instrument for obtaining information” for the Russian court case.”

Read the article in full